13. Snoring Sonnets?

I personally find love poems kind of snore-inducing. Not all love poems, of course, but most. In the eighth grade I had to do a group poetry project and when I told my group (of fellow girls) that I preferred poems about sadness and death, they all had looks on their faces like that wanted to go out and buy me a truck load of romantic comedies and subscription to Seventeen magazine. Sure, I like those things, too, but there are only so many times I can read grandiose lines like "I fell into the liquid aqua of her eyes, brushed fingers over the roses in her pearly skin."

ZzzZzzZzzZzz.

Maybe it's because I just don't really relate to it, I don't know, but it has to be the reason I generally shy away from sonnets. I find their subject matter...flat. Again, NOT always, but often, particularly with older poems.

The point of all of that introduction was to highlight the reasons I DO like Shakespeare's Sonnet 130.

My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun;
Coral is far more red than her lips' red;
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;
If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.
I have seen roses damask'd, red and white,
But no such roses see I in her cheeks;
And in some perfumes is there more delight
Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.
I love to hear her speak, yet well I know
That music hath a far more pleasing sound;
I grant I never saw a goddess go;
My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground:
And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare
As any she belied with false compare.



I love a writer that can make fun of himself (or herself!), and Shakespeare certainly does that here. I know we talked about it in class, but I just wanted to point out that this was my favorite of that packet just because it was such an anti-love love poem. Sure, the female in me should maybe be offended that he looks at her this way, and I would much rather have a guy write something like Sonnet 18 for me...but I appreciate the edge to 130.